Author: eric guttenberg
Date: 06:37:54 04/10/99
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I suspect "fear of losing" may have been a factor in Fischer's quitting after he won the championship in 1972. That fear may have been a motivating factor for him on the way to the title but once he had nowhere to go but down, it may have become a disabling factor. If you want to call that "cowardice", I won't argue-you are probably right. But I think it is unfair to let personal dislike of a person, however justified, cause us to ignore facts. Let's face it, ELO ratings are pretty relative anyway and are probably a poor way to compare players from different eras. Does a 2700 rating in 1970 have the same meaning as a 2700 rating in 1999? The fact is that between March 1970 when Fischer beat Petrosian 3-1 in the World vs. USSR match and September 1972 when he won the title, Fischer showed a degree of dominance that had not been seen in chess in over a hundred years. He played in , I believe 3 extremely strong tournaments, winning them all. He played in a very powerful blitz tournament and won by a huge margin. He won 3 candidates matches against 3 of the best grandmasters around-two of them by shutout scores of 6-0. And he beat a very highly regarded Spassky by 12 1/2- 8 1/2, including a forfeiture loss. In that 2 1/2 year period, he played roughly 100 games, not counting speed tournaments, lost only 5 and at one point, covering the end of the interzonal and the candidates matches, won 20 games in a row, without even a draw against the best grandmasters in the world. A few years ago, I read a quote from Kasparov that he viewed Fischer as the all-time greatest player because he believed the best way to measure that is to look at the gap between the player in question and his contemproraries and Fischer's gap was "huge". Whatever Fischer has done since 1972, I think it is only fair to recognize that at one time he was a great competitor, with skill and courage. What he has become since then is a different story, but that shouldn't erase his accomplishments from the stream of history. eric
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